--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud@...>
wrote:
>
> >
> > ========
> > The first issue is the absence of relationship between fish-roe,
> > excrement, calf of leg, vulva and the rest.
> > Before talking about substrate, it would be nice to have a "word"
> > and a word is basically a "meaning" plus a "sound" (plus a
> > syntactical class)
> > There's no meaning here.
> > A.
> > ==========
> The meaning is "inferior meat", that which hunter-gatherers can
> obtain, seen from the point of view of those who can produce better
> meat; the rest is derivative.
>
> ========
>
> Could you explicit the relationships between : fish-roe, excrement,
> calf of leg, vulva, prostitute, piss, to begin with ?
>
> I cannot see how these meanings fit in your "inferior meat"
> scenario.
>
> A.
I'll re-sequence them. It's
fish-roe, calf of leg -> excrement, vulva, prostitute
Once hunter/gatherers meet with pastoralists, a social hierarchy
appears, in which the hunter/gatherers are considered undisciplined
and inferior, and that value judgment is extended to their food. That
food will be considered as food of the lower classes (the former
hunter-gatherers), thus unsavory, dangerous and unacceptable, by those
who can afford to avoid it, cf Engl. chitlings "tripe", Da. kød, Sw.
kött "meat". From there the word is extended to everything considered
unsavory, dangerous and unacceptable.
The calf of leg sense is the tough one, but it can be solved by
looking at the idea I think came from Koivulehto, that the Germanic
words for 'thick' and 'thigh' were loans into Finnic (I think it's the
other way round). The 'thick' item then becomes the designator of "the
meaty/valuable part of the leg of the animal", which word by its
existence posits (Marx would say) the existence of a less valuable
part, the skank/calf.
Torsten